There's a meta-problem here: GitHub Actions is one of those things that when you first encounter it, is presented as: "we've got it all figured out and all goin on here, and anyone who is scratching their head must be dumb". This pattern, in my experience, shows up frequently in the software realm. Then, typically there follows some period where you try to do whatever you need to do by reading docs and copying what you see others do. Frustration and head scratching grows finally culminating in a process of "Ok WTF are the core concepts of this thing, what were they thinking when they designed it, what is it really going???".

The article is what you end up finding after that stage has been gone through.

The conclusion of course is that whoever invented this stuff really wasn't thinking clearly and certainly didn't have the time to write decent documentation to explain what they were thinking. And now the whole world has to try to deal with their mess.

My theory as to how this ends up happening is that the people creating the thing began with some precursor thing as their model. They made the new thing as "old thing, with a few issues fixed". Except they didn't fully understand the concepts in that thing, and we never got to see that thing. You'll see many projects that have this form: bun is "yarn fixed". Yarn is "npm fixed". And so on. None of these projects ever has to fully articulate their concepts.